ATG – Renovation 13 – The Installation of the New Seats

Yesterday, August 27, installers for the Irwin Seating Company out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, installed the new seats at the Players Guild of Dearborn. The six man crew worked for approximately twelve hours to install the 244 seats.

The seats arrived in a semi-trailer and were loaded into the Guild via the loading dock in the shop. In the picture below, the boxes containing the seats and seat parts can be seen on the stage.

The first part of the installation was creating a chalk grid on the Guild floor. Constantly referring to an Irwin seating plan, the installers marked the floor to show exactly where each seat would go and where it’s bolts that will hold the seats in place would be drilled into the floor. (Watch the planning process in the video. In some of the frames you can see the plans. Irwin seating did a tremendous job.)

When the grid was complete, the crew assembled two “test chairs” to determine if everything was working correctly. (This planning process took as long or longer than the actual installation described below.)

Following the “test chair” assembly, the crew installed the seat supports for all 244 chairs. They can be seen in the picture below. The paper on the floor is one copy of the Irwin seating plan.

Finally, the crew installed all the seat backs and seat cushions. Then they went methodically through the auditorium securing all the bolts.

The new seats look great, both from the front and the back. The two aisles are much wider than they were and the space between the rows is also much wider than it was.

James Mayne, our Production Governor, set up the video camera to create this time-lapse video of the installation. His father, Guild member Mike Mayne, did the video editing and added the sound. Great job guys.

Watch this time-lapse video of the installation of the new seats in our house.

When the seats were all in, Dave Wood, our Stage Governor, said, “Now that the seats are in there are only 784 more things to do before we can open.”